…There was a post here honoring Chris Benoit, who in terms of what he meant as a professional wrestler, was one of my all time favorites. Due to what we’ve found out about the circumstances of his and his family’s death since I put that post up, it has been removed.

It’s your not-so-friendly neighbourhood Seth back with another rant of sorts.

Recently, I got into a debate with someone about the relative ‘realness’ of my favourite pasttime, pro wrestling. Their entire point was that since the entirety of pro wrestling follows a loose script, that there fore it was “fake” and therefore not worth their time. When pressed on that point, and reminded that television shows, movies, “reality shows”, basically everything thats not a newscast, documentary, or sporting event is scripted right down to the second, the conversation was ended with me being told that I didn’t understand their point.

Yes, professional wrestling is scripted.

No, it’s not a sport in the same way that football or baseball or basketball is.

If you’re going to avoid wrestling simply because it’s scripted, then you must by that logic only watch…well, nothing. Even the news follows a script as to when segments go on and are aired, and they’re definitely edited to show one perspective or another, or edited for content. It’s not 100 percent ‘really’ what happened most of the time.

So I went to the WWF (note to anyone who cares, I refuse to call it the WWE) house show at the Breslin Center on Sat. night. For the uninitiated, a house show is a completely untelevised event. There will be no title changes, nor are any storylines advanced/affected, unless someone suffers an injury severe enough to keep them off television. This -is- however, the way that most of the wrestlers, especially the ones who aren’t big names, make their money. The house show is wrestlings equivalent of a regular season game. You make more bonus cash when you play in the Super Bowl and the playoffs (or appear on the televised events and pay-per-views), but the meat of your check is made during the regular season. For those who attend, it’s wrestling for the sake of wrestling. Therefore, you would think the wrestling would be good, and it wouldn’t be blatantly obvious that most of the people just weren’t trying.

You would be wrong, in this case.

Bottom line, don’t ever go to a WWF non-televised event, even when the ticket and the concessions you consume are free, which they were for me.

That is all on this topic, before the furies consume me and i stick someone with a shiv.